When you start GoLive 5, you’ll discover a stylish
and sober user interface. You’ll instantly notice that the user
interface isn’t exactly the same than the award winning one of Adobe
PhotoShop or Illustrator even if they are really similar. First of all a
main toolbar is displayed just under the menu bar and shows various
commands. Unfortunately this toolbar isn’t customisable but you can
easily undock it and move it to the place you want to. Under it you’ll
discover the working window where you’ll design your webpage: this
window is divided in five tabs that are: Layout, frames, source, outline
and preview. The first tab named layout is where you can design in WYSIWYG
your webpages. This viewing mode doesn’t show the frames your webpage
may contain and you’ll have to switch to the frame view to see or design
them. Double clicking a frame will open the webpage that corresponds to it
in a separate window: it’s almost useful as you may concentrate yourself
on the design of each frame separately. The source tab will obviously
display the HTML code generated by GoLive and you’ll hopefully be able
to design your web pages using pure HTML coding (Byron will love that!).
The outline tab offers an original viewing mode where you’ll see all the
tags that are in the current page displayed like buttons: it’ll allow
you to rearrange tags and their contents easily without digging into the
HTML code. Best of all you can change the tag viewing display by showing:
a header view, a circumscribe view, or a full view that will display all
the settings associated to a tag. Finally the preview tab will show the
web page layout that matched your web browser settings.

Adobe GoLive 5.0
Interface

Features

The main toolbar of Adobe GoLive 5.0 offers all the
commands needed to change the font settings (color, size, alignment) of
the selected sentence as well as a command to insert hyperlinks or to
broke them. Here is an interesting feature of Adobe GoLive: when you want
to insert a link to a page or something else you have to select the word
and click the link button then you’ll type the URL in the inspector
window which is like in every other software. However when you want to
remove the hyperlink attached to a word simply click the delete link
button and it’ll be removed quicker than FrontPage. On the main toolbar
of GoLive you’ll also find a button to quickly jump between the
different pages that may be actually opened (very useful!), another button
to view one of the opening pages in the default
web browser while the last button launches the Adobe OnLine browser that
is the place to get tips, tricks, and various updates on your GoLive
software. The toolbar palette contains all the objects you can add to your
webpage: this objects are sorted in nine different tabs. The standard tab
contains all the standard objects (I’m sure you guessed it!) like text
areas, floating boxes, picture, table, Quicktime, real or flash objects,
line, COM objects, java applet, horizontal spacing, banner tools and more.
The second tab of the object palette contains what Adobe call SmartLinks:
this is a new revolutionary feature only offered by GoLive. Indeed this
feature enables you to insert graphics or animations created by LiveMotion,
PhotoShop or Illustrator (it only works with release 9 of Illustrator)
directly into your web page. More… once the graphic is inserted into the
page you can edit it and modify it in its original application like
Illustrator: however this is a bit slow as Illustrator or LiveMotion has
to be launched separately to convert the files. The best integration with
other Adobe software is when you use PhotoShop files as GoLive will invoke
the ‘optimized for the web’ feature, which will convert your PhotoShop
(same process for Illustrator or LiveMotion files but really much slower)
graphics into a GIF, PNG (8 or 24), or JPEG file in order to be viewable
by every browser. Just like in Adobe PhotoShop the ‘optimized’ for the
web will show in a window four different views of the same picture with
different compressing rates so you can compare them and see which is the
best compromise between weight, and quality. Obviously you can change the
output format (Gif, jpeg, etc.) as well as the compression rates, the
color palette, the framework type, and the displaying method (progressive,
etc.) Sure you can change the zoom rate while previewing the picture,
which is great with large pictures. Finally each thumbnail will display
the quality and the size of the final compressed file that’ll be
created. Note that Photoshop layers can also be imported and converted as
well as multi layer PhotoShop files that can be imported as sprites. This
tab of the object palettes also contain advanced objects you can add to
your webpage like modification date, animated button, scrolling list, and
more. The third tab of the palette contains all the objects needed to
create web forms, like buttons, text frames, checkboxes, etc. The fourth
tab of the objects palette contains different type of headers you’ll be
able to add to your page. To design frames the fifth tab of the object
palette contains all the stuff you need as it comes with several different
frames layouts. The QuickTime tab manage the specifications of the 4th
QuickTime format: soundtracks, sprites, pictures, animated icons, texts,
and more can be added to a real film maker tool. It’s an amazing and
incredible feature that GoLive is the only websites designing software out
on the market today to offer it. Indeed once you have added a QuickTime
movie to your webpage you can click the ‘mounting editor’ button and
you’ll discover a real time line editor where you’ll be able to create
a real film or animation by customizing events the way you want. Best of
all you can add DHTML animations to your webpage and edit them with the
same kind of timeline editor than in LiveMotion. During the edit process
you can add scenes, change their length and more!

Adobe GoLive 5.0
TimeLine Editor

Now let’s see the
central part of Adobe GoLive: the inspector palette: this palette shows
all the options and settings you can change that are linked to a selected
object you’ve previously added to your document. In the inspector
you’ll also be able to insert the URL objects or text should link to as
well as creating animated buttons. In fact animated buttons are normal
graphic button to which you can easily include two other states: you can
assign a picture for mouseover or mouse click. The objects inspector is
also the place where you’ll be able to select DHTML actions in order to
insert them later in your document. GoLive 5.0 perfectly and naturally
handles embedded links in PDF or SWF files!

Adobe GoLive 5.0
Inspector Palette

New to GoLive 5.0 is the
famous ‘history’ palette that gives at least webmaster the right to
make errors as they can undo every action they did just like in PhotoShop:
what a nice job Adobe achieved!